The Information by James Gleick
Behind the book's rather florid subtitle ("A History, a Theory, a Flood") lies a powerful and rigorous and at times very moving history of information — the channels through which it flows, the way those channels shape it and the way it changes the humans who built those channels and bathe in them 24/7. You can dip into The Information at just about any point and emerge with a magnificent detail. For example, you'll be haunted by the lonely specters of the early telegraphs, huge signaling towers on hills that passed information by waving their robotic arms; a vast network of them loomed over Europe, only to be rendered obsolescent moments after its completion by the invention of the electric telegraph. But there's a larger argument here, one that grapples with the inflection point of Claude Shannon's invention of information theory in 1948, which effectively separated and abstracted the concept of information from the arbitrary meaning that it carries. After that, can the two ever be rejoined?